Qwitter is bad for everyone

I’ve been meaning to write something about Qwitter for a while now but have been holding off because of two main reasons, namely that I really despise the app coupled with the fact that I really like the guys who built it. If you don’t know already Qwitter monitors your twitter account and notifies you when someone stops following you. It’s built by Ireland’s Contrast who are extremely cool and totally rock in my book. So, there you have my biases front and center.

My biggest problem with Qwitter, and the one that covers all the bases in one shot is that is creates drama and negativity from something that should be innocuous. Can you imagine if there was a service out there that notified you when someone you know chose to move an e-mail you sent them from their inbox to their archive folder, or worse to delete it? If you got a notice saying “Britney Spears just deleted the e-mail you sent on the 5th of October with the subject ‘OMG R U Pregnant AGAIN?!’ ” – Even if Britney had already responded to your e-mail you’d be forced to wonder what she was thinking when she clicked delete. Maybe she was pissed off at you and steaming at the thought of it, or maybe she was just deleting all the e-mails she’d gotten last month that had already been responded to. You wouldn’t know either way, but are now forced to wonder. An act as simple and common as deleting an old e-mail has now sparked feelings of resentment.

In a way that is what Qwitter does to twitter. I’ve written before about how I use twitter and have heard from a good number of people that their usages follows mine to some extent. On any given day I add 2-3 people, remove 2-3 people, read the tweets by several people that I don’t follow by looking at their page on the site, and maybe turn notifications on or off for a person or two. If I’m traveling, that gets compounded. Frequently when going to a new city I’ll start following 10-20 new people who I might be interacting with, and I might stop following 10-20 people from a previous city who I won’t be running into on a daily basis. I’ve written about how when I start following more than 200 people the flood of tweets is so constant that I miss more than I get and it becomes useless for me. And the beautiful thing is that because of the web version of twitter, and tools like Facebook, Ping.FM, Friendfeed, Loopt, etc – I don’t need to actually “follow” someone on twitter to read everything they post to twitter. To go back to the e-mail analogy I don’t need to keep an e-mail in my inbox to be interested in what the person has to say.
Qwitter ignores all of this and makes the assumption immediately that one person stopped following another because of something they said. This is one of the notices Qwitter might send (example taken from their own site)

John Gruber (gruber) stopped following you on Twitter after you posted this tweet:

What’s the difference between Arial and Helvetica?

The immediate assumption with a message like this is that Gruber is annoyed with you asking about Arial and Helvetica and has kind of kicked you out of his house for asking. Now you are left wondering why that bothered him so much, and what you can do to get back in his good graces. Or worse you might start nit picking things he’s saying on twitter or unfollow him in retaliation. Maybe you’ll get really pissed off because you think it’s a totally fair question and you’ll tell other people what an ass Gruber is for dissing you like that. Maybe next time you see him you’ll confront him for this dick move and demand he explains his actions?

So maybe a week goes by and you are getting right pissed about this, and finally you see this Gruber character and you give him a piece of your mind. But what happens if he points out that he had no problem with your question and actually was writing up a longer reply for you that he was planning to post to your Facebook account, which is where he follows most of his good friends now since his boss and coworkers are now on twitter and he uses that mostly for business these days. Now don’t you feel like a jerk? Thanks Qwitter!

If you think this is an extreme example then let me tell you about ones that are actually real. I’ve had 4 people confront me because I stopped following them and Qwitter told them. All 4 of those people were pissed off at me for it. 3 of them had stopped following me to get even. The one who didn’t, well he didn’t follow me to begin with but was still angry, yet in the e-mail he sent me he noted that he didn’t know who I was. The truth is I didn’t know who he was either, don’t remember following him, don’t recall anything anything he’d ever tweeted about and can only assume I added him by accident at one point when following a reply thread. Qwitter caused negative drama between two people who don’t know each other, have had no interaction, and really no reason for any bad feelings. In the other cases the extremely negative assumptions people had made were mostly wrong. I’d stopped following them because I read their updates on other services, or because their tweets were mostly links to posts on their blog which I’d already seen in my rss reader. In one case the person was someone I’d only met once, added them but after a few weeks realized I didn’t have much in common with and probably wouldn’t be interacting with them again so no reason to keep following them. They didn’t do anything wrong, however thanks to Qwitter they assumed I was angry with them about something they’d posted.

And those are just the ones I know about, what about people who don’t say anything but see someone unfollow them and decide it’s because of what or how they write and then start stressing about it. Some folks will surely try to adjust what they say on twitter to prevent people from dropping them, which kind of defeats the idea of twitter in the first place. Is twitter there for you to share your thoughts, or only for the thoughts that other people have given a seal of approval to?

The truth is there are a million reasons someone could stop following someone else on twitter, the majority of which are totally harmless and innocent. This matches up with the million different ways people can use twitter itself. Qwitter doesn’t allow for any of that and assumes all people use twitter the same way and if someone stops following you it’s because you did something wrong. That’s a terrible assumption to make and doesn’t benefit anyone. Twitter understands this and that is the reason they don’t send notifications when someone stops following you. It’s the same reason they don’t require you to follow everyone who follows you – because everyone uses it differently and it’s a mistake to try to paint one persons usage habits on everyone else.

On the Qwitter site they note that “Qwitter is not affiliated with Twitter, but wouldn’t it be cool if it was?” My answer is no. Qwitter is not good for anyone. It takes something fun and useful and turns it into a dramafest. I know this isn’t intentional. I’ve meet Paul and Eoghan from Contrast and they are both smart, stand up guys with a ton of talent and great ideas. I can’t wait to see what they come up with next, but I really wish Qwitter would die in a firey hell.

Comments (46)

They should rename the app GuiltTwitter.
I honestly don’t care if people drop me or not. I follow people I find interesting and post links I think people might like to know about that I dig. I find it weird that people use Twitter to measure their self-worth.

Hey Sean, yep… Qwitter (and its cousin Twitterless) is trouble with a capital T. I tend to follow only a handful of people so it doesn’t concern me as much as someone like yourself who does a lot of follow/unfollowing.

It’s not so much the concept of knowing when somebody stops following you (this feature is already built into Twitter though not automated) – it’s the idea of linking the unfollow action to a particular message. There is no reason to assume the 2 things are related. Causal attribution 101.

One more thought. I don’t think there’s anything wrong with someone sending a personal message like “hey I noticed you stopped following me… I just want to make sure I didn’t upset or offend you.” If someone sent me that message I would respond honestly and graciously, and it may prevent hard feelings on either side.

I’d like to see Twitter offer the ability to send a farewell DM when you unfollow someone, so you can set the record straight before they catch wind of it.

@RICK REY – Once my site is out of Private Alpha I have this built-in, in that a discreet msg is sent (on your request) to the user who unfollowed. This inturn allows them to provide feedback via a super simple unfollow survey.

“ability to send a farewell DM when you unfollow someone”
– Thats kind of funny and very easy to accomplish.

The first time I went to the Qwitter site to see what all the fuss (literally) was about, I laughed. Look at the logo! It’s a crying…thing (tear drop?). I’m pretty happy with the little drama that comes with my life. I don’t need to subscribe to more. If you don’t want to follow me, I’m sure you have your reasons. It shouldn’t be about hard feelings. People are way too sensitive.

I’ve seen drama congregate around Qwitter notices too, and I signed up for Qwitter out of curiosity. My subsequent experiences and observations track, roughly, as follows:

—–
My initial reaction was pure geek: I was enthused at the easy availability of a new metric, and enjoyed imagining how the guys at Contrast were doing data management.

Then I got my first “You got dropped” notice. The.very.first.thing.I.saw was the notice’s statement of a causal link between something I said and the user unfollowing me. I immediately identified this misrepresentation as a potential source of needless drama.

But it seemed so patently absurd to me that a robot would claim the ability to divine cause and effect, that I also immediately read past it as a failure of language. So in my case, I wasn’t *personally offended* that @beep had stopped following me. Nor did I attribute cause to it.

The individual Qwitter notices never meant much to me at all. I don’t take it personally if someone follows me or unfollows me. There are people I’m interested in following, and I follow them. It’s pretty much a one-sided deal. Qwitter doesn’t change that, nor should you let it.

I filter Qwitter notices directly to my Archives folder in Gmail. I’m interested in the ebb and flow of follow activity from a relatively high level, and that’s about it. I don’t need to read the emails to get out of them what I care about.
—–

One thing I’d love to see Twitter implement is a stats display. I’d personally love to see if there are correlations between tweet volume and the balance between new followers and departing followers. I’d like to see who favorited my tweets in a setting more generalized and less exclusive than Favrd.

As for your thesis, that Qwitter causes drama and is thereby bad for everyone: Qwitter definitely facilitates drama, encourages people to read meaning into actions where to effectively do so is simply impossible – for a human or a robot. But strictly speaking, it’s not causing drama. People are.

And Qwitter could be a lot better for everyone if its emails were simply reworded so as not to mislead their recipients.
Saying “@user stopped following you on Twitter after you posted this tweet:” is too close to “…BECAUSE you posted this tweet:” That kind of nuance is critical. As you’ve very articulately illustrated. 🙂

I like this post and it was an enjoyable read, but I have to disagree. I think Qwitter gets too much credit for being the creator of drama and negativity. It’s a software app — it spits out info of what happened and when. There’s no “why”. It’s people who imagine/assume the why, and the hurt feelings and the drama ensue. I started using Qwitter a few weeks ago and when I got my first notification, it did come with a little sting, followed by some deep soul searching and then…oh wait the phone rang or the dog barked and I forgot all about it and haven’t thought about it since.

If you can’t take it or it just makes you feel bad, it’s time to qwit Qwitter.

I actually like Qwitter. Just this last week, I received a notice and turns out, they were mass dropping followers because it was too difficult to manage (not realizing who I was at the time). A little training and point at TweetDeck
and this user not only refollowed me, but others as well.

I have noticed a bit of “follow one day, then unfollow a few days later – hoping that you followed me and didn’t notice I dumped you” – especially from the new users or spammers.

I’ve moved away from the general, “you follow me, I’ll follow you”. I now try to follow folks that I find interesting too. And if a follower from my first Twitter days decides to leave, it’s nice to be able to go back, look at their Tweets and decide if their content is what I want to see.

I think it just needs a warning label “Do not use if you are emotionaly unstable or have confidence issues as Qwitter may be hazardous to your emotional well being.”

I’ve just started using Qwitter but I immediately sussed that it should be used to measure trends not individual reactions. The very fact that people don’t read your tweets immediately means that the data point of “After you tweeted…” is imprecise.

The cool thing about Qwitter is that it tells you who is leaving (and when), it doesn’t tell you why. The REALLY cool thing is that it does it without requiring your password.

Maybe Qwitter should only be used by engineers because they’ll only be interested in the stats and trends and not the drama behind them…

I think I have a similar attitude to @MissRFTC – The only people who aren’t completely bewitched by my comings and goings, or completely in awe of the intellect behind the perspicaity of my occassional thoughts are those who haven’t shared in them yet. I need no ‘qwitter’ metrics because no one ‘qwits’ me….

Ha, this is funny timing. I’ve never used Qwitter, but I just deleted my twitter account today because I was taking it too personally when my follower # decreased. (I realize that’s stupid, but I kept overthinking every tweet, and since I hadn’t been a twitter user for long, it just seemed easier to close the account.)

Great post sean but I think that the problem is with the design of Twitter itself. Ok facebook you have many privacy settings & the ability to group friends into “lists.”

Because Twitter conflates the concept of “friend” & follower, we are robbed of the ability to be friends with someone that we don’t want to read on an hourly basis. I have had plenty of Twitter drama before qwitter existed (e.g. Peeps who tried to DM me but couldn’t because I had stopped following them which is a perfect example). I still want to get DMs from friends who I don’t follow because they tweet 20 times a day.

Thanks for this post. This (“creates drama and negativity from something that should be innocuous”) is exactly why I left Qwitter almost as soon as signing up.

Someone whose Tweets I was enjoying unfollowed me after something I thought not inflammatory. I spent a fair amount of time being anxious over that and wrote a Tweet about the anxiety I experienced. He kindly replied about why he’d unfollowed (a pretty innocuous reason, in fact) and I decided the anxiety factor was totally not worth it.

i wouldnt use it but i imagine this can be useful for someone using twitter in a specific way (advocating, promoting, etc.); this is just information and your response to it is all your inner work; tha fact that you got it with your latest tweet at the time someone unfollowed could be treated as just a pointer in time; you attach the meaning; always; i see no drama here

I use Qwitter and I don’t freak out about it if someone Qwits me. It’s happened. It will happen again. I find it helps me to determine when I’m clogging up the airwaves with my silly BS.

I don’t think Qwitter is to blame for drama and negativity. I think people are to blame, and if there wasn’t some easy way for people to find out who “quit” them, they’d find another way, or produce drama from somewhere else. Some people just like to freak out. Qwitter may help enable that, but for those people, really, so does everything else.

I’ve been using Twitter for a year and a half now and I was glad to find Qwitter. Here’s why.

Most of the time I follow people who follow me first. It mostly just seems like good etiquette. I do check them out first and make sure they’re not losers … like if they are self-proclaimed “social networking experts” but don’t have the resume to back it up. Or Twitter for them is obviously all about trying to market something stupid, like pills to enhance that certain male member.

Following this model I’ve built up several thousand followers. However, what I’ve noticed is the number of people I am following continues to increase at a significantly greater rate than the number of people who follow me. Which shouldn’t be, because 99% of the people I follow are people who started following me first.

Which means, there are a lot of people out there who have stopped following me, for whatever reason.

I don’t really care what the reason is (I’m not insecure enough to blame my content), and there’s no hard feelings about it. But if they’ve stopped following me, and I’m not really supremely interested in their content either, then I’d like to know so I can unfollow them too. No sense keeping a one-sided “relationship” going. And seeing my numbers keep going out of whack, which might end up making me look like one of those losers I mentioned earlier.

So, I found Qwitter a nice tool to help me identify the people who are no longer following me, so I can make a rational decision about unfollowing them too.

As long as there are no hard feelings (which there shouldn’t be … we’re all adults here, right? Well, most of us anyway), what’s the harm in that?

Interesting read. I had the same thought too when i received my qwitter notification. I thought to myself “oh that was my bad tweet!” , but after few more random quit notification, I found out that they were returning my favor ( to unfollow ) and i find it funny as well.

But its okay to track who’s unfollowing once in a while. Just try not to get too personal.

Twitter has a bug which occasionally causes followers who haven’t unfollowed to disappear. They are then usually horrified and want to re-follow. I’ve just signed up to Qwitter in the hope that it might identify those when it happens, so I can contact them. Will it do this? And if not, is there something that will?

Don’t let anyone tell you your follower base is not valuable to you and your company professionally.

Question: If you represent XYZ Widget Corp and you just saw that the CEO of We Buy Widgets Corp unfollowed you…wouldn’t you be concerned that you mght also lose the CEO of Widget Distributors Inc as well?

Question: If you were a twittering MBA and the CEOs of several corps were following you…and then you said “I just made out with a cute honey at the disco”…and they unfollowed you…

That might reflect quite dramatically on your future…even if you know they should have lightened up.

The fact is that you can lose some very powerful people if you bore them or offend them. Stoicism may be the right way not to be stressed, but your future might still be altered.

Obviously this is software many of us want to use but don’t want the people we might unfollow to be using. Because of Qwitter’s existence, I think twice before following someone in the first place. There could be business relationships at stake.

And remember that companies tend to follow in order to get followed…some spammers follow and then unfollow two days later when they think you are stupid enough to have followed them and not notice that they unfollowed.

If someone follows me, it by no means means that I will follow them only to get totally bored by their tendency to use Twitter to discuss what they just ate and then unfollow.

When I unfollow, it is almost always because I think they are lame (or at least their tweets are).

There is good reason for the drama. I have basically just said “you bore me” and meant it quite seriously. But because of Qwitter, I tend to do this only to those who are not also following me.

Unless someone is truly brilliant and posting a lot, I tend to only follow those who post parsimoniously so I won’t have to unfollow them even if they later bore me out of my skull. But I check their past posts to see that interesting ones outnumber dull ones.

Sometimes I quit because they are speaking a language I do not speak…constantly. I followed a lot of Dutch when the Turkish airliner crashed…and have since unfollowed almost every last one of them.

Qwitter helps one remember to BE INTERESTING. Nobody really wants to know what you are doing now except your girlfriend, your Mom and your Dog…and none of the above need to know all that often either.

That said, I have some heavy hitters following me and it might be a sign that I was just hurt professionally if I lost the better of those.

Qwitter would help me know when I lost a heavy hitter so, in order not to lose another heavy hitter I can react.

Don’t let anyone tell you your follower base is not valuable to you professionally.

Another aspect entirely: Twitter and Qwitter create a very politically correct atmosphere for those of us using our real names. We mostly don’t give political opinions if we also represent corporations.

If I were anonymous and political and representing a certain organization and writing really good well-spaced and cogent material that was getting a following on a certain cause, I would take it very seriously if a key US senator had followed and then unfollowed.

I´m not a Qwitter user but I am considering it – however, it is not for everyone but should be used strategically by those who wish to be more aware of the effect of using different approaches to using twitter and keep an eye out for any people they feel are important or leaders in their market that may decide to unfollow.

the analogy to the email being deleted/archived although no doubt chosen to bring a few people heading towards therapy issues to come back to reality was not for me quite right it is more like someone putting a block on your email address or flagging everything you send as being spam – which is something to be concerned about but lets face it most relationships on Twitter are pretty superficial.

Is it really the app or the idea that’s the problem, or the way people use it? I’m curious about who unfollows me, but I can’t say I care enough to drop them, comment, retaliate, what have you. It’s just curiosity, partly to see if companies follow, then unfollow to build their following. If someone is really a friend, then how could something really affect a real, meaningful friendship? So use, but use wisely.

I like Qwitter for one major reason… curiosity. I’m curious who follows me and unfollows me. The majority of people who unfollow me are those I unfollow. I find the whole pissing contest of who has the most followers to be lame. I also find it lame when people think that you should follow someone back if they follow you, which tends to be the reason people unfollow someone who unfollowed them.

With lists, I now “follow” all the people I unfollowed, but not in my all friends feed. I follow them in various lists. The reason is to keep my all friends feed cleaner to make it easier to read when I’m on the go on my phone. I like to be able to see as many tweets as possible. When I’m at home or work, I use Tweetdeck to make seeing all the lists as easy as possible. Perhaps I’m one of the only people who uses lists in this way, but to all my former followers, I’m still following you.

Twitter is for politicians. Sound bytes.
Facebook is a personal security risk and heavily monitored by the good guys and bad guys.
If you have relationships use e-mail or text for a real discussion. People with substance will respond.

You obviously have good writing skills and have no problem communicating, just choose better minds to touch.

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Hi, I’m Sean Bonner

I recently moved to Tokyo after 17 years in Los Angeles. I’ve run hackerspaces and blog networks, an art gallery, design firm and a record label. I’m one of the co-founders of Safecast, and currently act as Global Director. I’m an Associate Professor at Keio University, a Shuttleworth Fellow, an MIT researcher and sit on the board of CicLAvia.